Tweet Tweet...

After having my paragraph published on Paragraph Planet last week (stories are only available for one day so if you missed it I’ll post a link when it becomes available in the archive section in February, http://www.paragraphplanet.com/) I picked up a few followers on Twitter.  There were a number of indie authors and publishers and a few random restaurants and the like touting for business. I dutifully followed those back that seemed relevant to my interests and that’s when the crap started to hit my timeline.

It’s great reading some of the tweets of the authors and wannabe authors - genuine messages about what they’re writing, what they’re promoting, successes they’ve had, stories in a tweet they want to share. After all, writing is a business and Twitter is basically a free marketing tool. But there are some that tweet the most inane, random, sometimes offensive, crap I’ve ever come across.

And that’s when the un-following exercise began.

Bye-bye Mr ‘Obama hating, gun toting, racist nut-job’. Adios Miss ‘I’m going to tweet other people’s motivational quotes at you every ten minutes’. Some of these people clearly schedule their tweets which means they’re not even actively engaging in conversation - they’re just programming a computer to send out this crap and I’m willingly receiving it! Not any more!

Why would anyone follow these people? 

I wasn’t an active user of Twitter until recently and I’ve come to realise that it’s a game for lots of people. A game to see who can amass the most followers and who can achieve the most likes or re-tweets. There’s a snowball effect; as one person follows you a bunch of their friends follow you, a kind of keeping up with the Jones’ of the internet age. Streaming through my timeline has become a slightly arduous task and I'm only following 154 people (at the time of writing - probably be much less after another cull!) 

Don’t even get me started on cat pictures...

Twitter can also be a really nasty place. It seems that every week I hear about perfectly decent human beings closing their accounts after being subjected to some pretty horrific and graphic on-line abuse. Fortunately, not something I've had to deal with first hand.

I guess that’s the reality of Twitter though - you can come and go as you please, follow and unfollow as you please. There are no friendships at risk of failure when you’re dealing with complete strangers and who’s going to notice or even care about losing a follower or two when you have thousands. It's sadly also an opportunity for the most horrendous parts of society to freely attack others with the benefit of complete anonymity.

Not all of my Facebook posts and tweets are exciting and fun packed but I’d like to think that I’m not annoying or offending anyone and anyway, there’s always the unfollow option.

After all, it’s quality not quantity that matters.